46 she went on. "He was a friend of my famIly. He was twenty-eight! He was a doctor." "What was his name?" "Arnold Metcalf. Met-calf. Any- way, we went skiing and then we ate dinner at a fancy restaurant. He got pretty drunk. He was driving me back to school, and I was scared, he was so drunk, but I didn't know how to drive a stick-shift. He had a Jaguar. He was even drunker than I'd thought. He said, 'I know a shortcut back to your college,' and he started d ri vin g off in the wrong direction. We went all the way down to Hartford-that was where he lIved-and by thIs tIme I was way late: the college had curfew then. I wanted to use his telephone to can my dorm, but he wouldn't let me. Then he proposed. He was crying He said he'd always see I had everything, beautiful clothes, anything I want- d " e.... "What'd you say?" "I told him he was ten years older than me, that he was drunk, that I wanted to use the telephone. He said no and he got very nasty.... He forced, I didn't know what to do, so I didn't do anything. I made him drive me all the way back. He said nothing the whole way. And you know the funny thing that happened? I gOt out of the car at my dorm, and on the way in I slipped on the ICe and fell right on my back and he laughed. He laughed and laughed." "J esus." She lit a cigarette. "What ever happened to him?" "Oh, I don't know," she saId. They were silent for a minute, listening to the rain gurgling in the drainpipe. " I ' . . h " h O d m gOIng to SIt up ele, e sal . "Do you mind if I sit up here?" He sat on the bed, a couple of feet from her. "Have you ever been in love?" she asked. "Once, maybe." He smiled down at the bedspread. "Have you ever been married?" she asked. God, what a stupid question, he thought. "No, have you?" he asked, sarcastically. "Yes," she said. "I am married" He had a sensation of things zoom- ing, spinning, and then settling com- Pdctly into place. The dog's tag. She told him she was separated from her husband. His name was Martin. They had separated in October (JUSt before he first saw her), as a trial. Aft- er a year they would decide whether to make it permanent. FIR.EWEED Not only in the vast parks with their crowded walks and water or In the private squares with their ranked tulips banked around clipped lawns, empty behind padlocks, but everywhere in this city there are trees: in four-by-four front gardens, on balconies in tubs, fruit trees, poplars, splotched rows of London planes pushing through the pavement, overhanging broken walls, stretching a mottled shade, breathing, surviving. From Notting Hill Gate, say, to Ladbroke Grove, the harsh scrags, leafless under winter gray, are nuisances to anyone wielding an umbrella; then suddenly in spring the blossoms billow, great foams of cumulus halo the streetlights in a shockIng festival of purification. Dropping into the rubble of any airshaft, along with the deceptive rain-sounds of the draIns will come not only the ledge-lodged pigeon's burble but a full dawn chorus of robin and thrush, blackcap, blue tIt, wood warbler, chiffchaff, scouting the treetops, their varIed voices surrounded and drowned by the ever-present blackbird's fuller variations on the clearest of flutes (falling, it is true, in to a coda on the bU7z saw), rising, mimicking, bursting into sunlight, a daily affirmation, tiU it in turn is drowned by the blast-fumous wings converging upon Heathrow Some to this day awake to that roar with a spasm of courage from dreams of sirens and searchlights, ghosts overhead, walls falling, moans from the stairwell, and the shattered trunks and branches of the trees After the plagues, the fires, and the bombings, when the docked city waited for judgment to sort through its remnants-shuffling precedents, probing foundations, following fit procedures- it was not the trees, shuddering into green, that first salved the jagged suppurations, but common willow herb, flowIng from every crevice, its bright magenta flaming unseeded, fleshing torn bones with a soft integument, just as, in the high Sierras on the other side of the world, when the smoke jumpers retreat from a blackened forest, the same miracle, earning its other name, starts up among the charred fragments of birds and animals to begin with ephemera] brilliance the long climb back to the sheltenng canopy of the trees. -WILLIAM H. MATCHETT . . "J esus," he said. "Jesus." "Come on," she said. ""''Thy don't you tell me about all your old loves?" "I, 1-" Steven sat with his mouth open, and then he began to cry, as he hadn't cried since childhood He cried and cried, whining loudly, he was con- scious of the sound he was making. It was perfectly delicious crying, and cry- Ing in front of Ann. "Stop it, stop," Ann said. "Come on. What's the trouble?" Her arms were around him; she was unbuttoning his shirt. " I can ' t . . . I ne er " He as v ... w still crying. "You mean you haven't? come on. I'll show you; it's important. It's not so zmportant take off your clothes." And then they had theIr clothes off and they were on his rug. The shock Well, not so Come,